


Not So Different

by Ithika



Category: Black Sails, Red Dead Redemption (Video Games)
Genre: Ancestors, Character Turned Into a Ghost, Crossover, F/M, Gen, Ghosts, I'm in full chaos mode today lads, benevolent haunting, ghost Charles Vane, the crossover literally nobody asked for
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-28
Updated: 2019-09-28
Packaged: 2020-10-29 22:18:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 615
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20803883
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ithika/pseuds/Ithika
Summary: He was there again. Arthur knew without looking up from his journal, though how he knew this, he couldn't say. He continued to write, stubbornly persisting in the face of the impossible, somehow hoping that doing so might make the apparition fade back into the darkness.It didn't work. It never did.Arthur receives advice from a long-dead pirate. One-shot probably





	Not So Different

**Author's Note:**

> Charles Vane is too stubborn to not become a ghost, and he takes Arthur Morgan under his incorporeal wing. A deeply indulgent one-shot that may or may not make sense to anyone but me

He was there again. Arthur knew without looking up from his journal, though how he knew this, he couldn't say. He continued to write, stubbornly persisting in the face of the impossible, somehow hoping that doing so might make the apparition fade back into the darkness. 

It didn't work. It never did. The ghost sat in the corner of his tent on a chair that wasn't there, smoking his tightly-rolled tobacco leaf as he always did, watching in the dark. The end glowed brighter as the man took a drag of phantom smoke. 

They were not a recent happening, the visits from this reticent spirit. Sometime after his father had swung had been the first time, and he'd appeared from time to time ever since. He rarely spoke these days, though his eyes said more than some gang members managed with any number of words. 

Arthur continued to work in his journal. He wasn’t sure what to do with the ghost: while he’d assisted Arthur several times in his lonely boyhood, and never been a malevolent presence, it made him uneasy, this proof of the afterlife. He began to draw, and the silence between the two of them fell into something almost companionable.

Until the ghost spoke. For all that his body was incorporeal, his voice was as strong as that of a living man, dry and deep from the ever-present tobacco. “You should tell her.” 

Pale blue eyes stare right at him when he lifts his own from the page, the ghost’s eyes possessed of the intense focus of a big cat. “Tell her, or lose her.” Charles - he’d told Arthur his name just the once, when they’d first met and Arthur had yet been a boy, and the outlaw had never forgotten it - did not have that sardonic tone he oft affected when he bothered to speak at all, but a rare - if harsh - earnestness that cut Arthur to the quick. He didn’t have to ask who he meant. 

The ghost cocks his head to one side, lips set in a thin line as restless fingers turn the cigarillo in his grasp. “You think she knows. Maybe she does; probably she doesn’t. Say the words. Don’t be a fucking coward.” There it is, that tiny twitch at the corner of his lips that over the years Arthur had come to recognise as a smile. He wondered if the dead man was speaking from experience - something told him he was. 

Charles stood, the chair he’d rested in vanishing like so much smoke. He bristled with swords, knives and pistols - though the guns gave Arthur some indication of how long the man had been a ghost. His expression twists a little further, the lopsided smirk deepening into something more like a grimace, though it passes in a moment as Charles reaches for Arthur’s shoulder, clearly forgetting himself. It passes through the living man, and they both flinch. “One more thing: fathers.” He shakes his head slightly as he unnecessarily adjusts the swords at his hips to allow himself to sit on Arthur’s desk - the swords pass through it anyway. “They’re more important than you or I really understand.” 

He takes a final drag from his cigarillo, blowing a smoke ring as he flicks the stub away from his beringed fingers - it vanishes the moment it leaves his touch. Silence falls between them again, this time a little awkward. It’s Arthur who breaks it, eventually. “This ain’t your usual kind of advice,” it isn’t quite a question.

Charles shrugs. “Take it or leave it.” 

He is gone as suddenly as he had arrived, leaving nothing but the faintest smell of tar and ocean in his wake. 


End file.
